Corps et âmes

From Auguste Rodin to Duane Hanson, Georg Baselitz to Michael Armitage, Ana Mendieta to Miriam Cahn, Philip Guston to Marlene Dumas, David Hammons to Kerry James Marshall, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami to Mira Schor, and from Arthur Jafa to Deana Lawson — she takes place in Galerie 3 of the museum for her first exhibition in France —, the exhibition “Corps et âmes” explores the significance of the body in contemporary thought as expressed in the works of some twenty artists in the Pinault Collection. In the matrix-like curves of the Bourse de Commerce, these bodies form a choreography, a multiple rondo.

Like Ceremony of Us, the piece composed by American choreographer Anna Halprin in 1969, after the race riots in the United States, in which, for the first time ever, black and white bodies danced together, this journey through the Pinault Collection invites viewers to rediscover, in the words of Jacques Rancière, the “possession of all their vital energies”. Freed from all mimetic constraints, the body—whether photographed, sculpted, drawn, filmed, or painted—does not cease to reinvent itself. This grants art an essential organicity that allows it, like an umbilical cord, to take the pulse of the human soul. Art seizes the energies and vital flows of our thoughts and inner lives to create a sensorial, humanist experience of otherness. Forms metamorphose, freeing themselves from figuration to seize, hold onto, and allow our soul and consciousness to emerge, as in David Hammons’ Body Prints. It is no longer a matter of merely painting bodies, instead embodying the forces that run through them, to bring to light what is buried and invisible, and to open up the shadows. This includes the currents of history and colonial heritage that permeate the work of Arthur Jafa, whose films, in their oscillations between life and death, and between violence and transcendence, unfold as a visual melody inspired by gospel, jazz, and black music in general, or the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, which hybridises reality and fiction, and the history of painting and the immediacy of the present day in the pictorial act.

The shadow of being uprooted and exiled inhabits the work of Ana Mendieta, whose own body explores the significance of our original myths in the contemporary world. As an itinerary, the exhibition is anchored in the struggles of the 1960s, in the civil rights, feminist, and peace movements, as seen through the works of Duane Hanson, Philip Guston, and Richard Avedon. It reveals the anger in our world today and the threats to individual integrity as in the immense floating bodies and wandering souls engaged in Georg Baselitz’s macabre and sacred dance, or those brought together in Miriam Cahn’s organic installation Ritual, in which bodies and souls in incandescent colours awaken our awareness of our shared humanity.

As part of the exhibition “Corps et âmes” and the focus on Arthur Jafa, Lebanese artist Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut, Lebanon) has been invited to occupy the display cases in the Passage at the Bourse de Commerce. His practice combines sculpture and filmed images to explore the history of traumas and the dephasing between the ancient and the contemporary worlds, between beliefs and illusions. Basing himself on the notion that the number of display cases (24) corresponds to the frame rate of one second of film, Ali Cherri invites visitors to circumambulate the Rotunda, as if within a pre-cinematic device, to break an image down into 24 “phase-sculptures”. This illusion of movement on which cinema is based connects this art form to the concept of resurrection, following the thought of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who said that “Cinema is the art of fantômachie, of battling ghosts ... it is the art of allowing ghosts to return”.

Curated by: Emma Lavigne